By: Al Sadiq Abudowara*
(1)
– But I don’t drink it… I don’t like coffee.
– But the fortune lives in it…I will only see your face at the bottom of the cup.
– I see it in the mirror and that’s enough.
– The mirror shows only what you want to see…But your fortune doesn’t care…It happens every day…Renews…Approves deals… His face smiles and frowns… It might become skinny like starving children and it might die from fullness…Do you know that ones fortune might die?I knew someone whose fortune died…They say that it committed suicide or it drowned in the bottom of a cup of coffee…No difference…The important thing was that he became without a fortune…So he didn’t move one step…He dug a grave decent of a man without a fortune and died.
So I drank…
I was afraid from a similar ending so I drank… And my fortune was living at the bottom…I thanked God that it was still alive…But it refused to come out from its hiding place…The fortune-teller tried…He made the giant efforts…He used genies… and inside my cup a great war was unleashed…
Genies from every colour got involved… The red one for ferocious fighting… the white one for friendly persuasion… The yellow one for some threats… And the blue one, to commit massacres.
Clouds of incense rose…Angry mutters growled and drums rumbled… And the bottom of that cup became a real war field…But my stubborn fortune continued to take refuge in his bottom, sheltered with a deathless eternal silence.
And this is how it happened…
My fortune was killed…It got hit by a stray lightening from a giant demon with an evil sward… Every thing came to silence and the war was over…Every body left, and I stayed…Alone not drinking coffee, tired, digging with a relentless determination, a grave decent of a fortuneless man.
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* Al Sadiq Abudowara (1963- ) Libyan short storyteller, has several published books, he is the managing editor of Quryna daily newspaper.
